River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  Autumn arrived. On a mellow, golden Kartik eve as he sat brooding outside his hut, there was a rustling beside him in the grass. He looked up and saw a tall and distinguished-looking bhikshu standing in front of him.

  “Hari! Hari!” the young man sprang to his feet happily.

  “Om mane padme hum1—” the bhikshu chanted and gave him a beatific smile.

  “Jewel in the heart of the mendicant’s gourd . . . ,” Gautam uttered good-humouredly, for he had noticed the diamond ring shining in the bhikshu’s begging bowl.

  “Precisely! Can you do me a favour?” the visitor asked in a whisper.

  “Yes, Your Highness, I mean Your Holiness.”

  “Look over there.”

  Gautam obediently turned round. The river-line was lit up with a procession of torches.

  “The King has come for his sport of elephant-trapping. She must be part of the entourage. As a pandit you will have easy access to the royal camp. Find her at the earliest and return the ring on my behalf.”

  Gautam thought quickly and said, “I’ll carry out your order on one condition, Sire.”

  “Wily Brahmin! The other day you threatened to inform the village drummer. What is it now?”

  “May I, sort of, fall in love with her? I keep dreaming of her night after night.”

  A cloud passed over the bhikshu’s face. “Permission granted,” he answered, trying to be jovial. “Now, give this to her from Brother Hari Ananda with his blessings. And you can have my blessings for whatever kind of future you may have.” He gave Gautam the ring. His hands trembled. Gautam tied the ring in a knot made with the corner of his mantle and tucked it into his dhoti. The monk was in a hurry to go back. Gautam accompanied him on the bridle path. They were quiet for a while.

  The bhikshu broke the silence. “Heard any good discourses lately?”

  “No. I’ve been cutting classes for some weeks. Too worried about the world situation.”

  Hari Ananda smiled fondly. “How big is your world, dear lad?”

  “Where I live is my world, and I am concerned about it.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “I go to town every day on my begging rounds, and I hear rumours. A friend of mine, Vimleshwar, lives in Shravasti. He designs fancy ornaments. Sometimes I make the sketches for him. He had gone to Pataliputra on business and he says the capital is full of unrest. The Dhan King has become very unpopular. More taxes—salt, sugar, even firewood is being taxed. Moreover, your Guru Chanakya, Vishnu Sharma of Taxila, has turned up there.”

  “He was bound to,” responded the bhikshu, jumping over a puddle. “If one wants to capture power one ought to be in the capital.”

  “So much is being spent on defence. Defence against whom? Both Saket and Madhya Desh are weak feudatories of Magadh, and Vimleshwar says our King is only a Rajan, not even a full-fledged Raja, with nobody to help him. His only son and heir has absconded. I didn’t tell Vimleshwar about you.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Aren’t you being an escapist? At a critical time like this you should have been at your poor old father’s side. Look, Magadh has always been troublesome. They even fought against Lord Krishna in the Great War. They like violence . . . their king, Ajatshatru, killed his own pater.”

  “These things happen in royal families,” the bhikshu remarked dispassionately.

  “I think that’s why the Princes Mahavira and Siddhartha both appeared in that land to preach peace,” Gautam went on. “But I have always wondered—both of them were contemporaries and lived and preached in the same region, but they never met.”

  “One of those things,” the bhikshu replied. They had reached the edge of the gurukul forest. “So, my friend, I bid farewell to you,” he said lightly.

  “That’s good of you. Here you are, sending me off on a perilous mission and you’re not worried at all. What if I’m caught and questioned by your august father?”

  “Let the future take care of itself. I think ‘she’ will protect you, I know her. Look at the chance you’re getting of meeting the lady of your dreams!”

  “One more thing, Sir. I have become a sort of believer in non-violence. What shall I do if war breaks out between Kaushal Desh and Magadh?”

  “Our actions are the result of our thoughts.”

  “How do you and I find ourselves over here at this moment in time? Are we merely the result of our thoughts?”

  “Our actions,” Hari Shankar answered patiently, “are due to necessity, or accident, or are caused by our own natures. One is not free. And therefore responsibility has no meaning.”

  “Can’t you be less enigmatic?”

  “The Enlightened One prophesied that a time would come when Pataliputra would perish in fire and flood and war. For all of life and its glories are a passing dream . . .”

  “In this shoreless ocean of events,” said Gautam, “you and I are floating like stray autumn leaves. Am I responsible for what has happened before me?”

  “Time cannot be determined. All is a dream and shall pass,” Hari Ananda replied.

  “Alarma had said to the future Buddha: happy friends are we that we look upon such fellow-ascetics as you. The doctrine which I know, you know too, and the doctrine which you know, I do too. Pray let us be joint wardens of the company—Tell me about non-violence,” Gautam pleaded.

  Far away in the village clubhouse the local bard had started reciting the folklore of the Great War.

  “Time, for this bard in the chowpal, has been vaguely divided into the Golden Age and the Age of Wickedness. Man has bound himself in his own concept of time while all the time he is being hurtled into eternity as he revolves, dangling in time, tied to a wheel of fire . . . ,” the bhikshu remarked. “Now, let me go back to my vihara. May all be well with you.” He walked away rapidly into the sunset, leaving Gautam bewildered and upset once again.

  Gautam returned to his hut. On the way he could see rush lights beyond the mahua grove. They were setting up camp. The wind wafted the murmur of voices and sounds.

  He entered his hut and flopped down on the mat. The prospect of meeting Champak was much too exciting and unexpected.

  Why did women have such power over men? he wondered. The Buddha had solved that problem too: shun them. He had told his chief disciple Ananda:

  “Don’t look at them.”

  “But suppose one’s glance falls on them, Sir?”

  “Do not speak to them.”

  “If they start talking to us?”

  “Keep wide awake.”

  Life was full of paradoxes. He thought of the sages’ contradictory statements about women. Woman could never be pure, she was the root of all evil, she was shallow. Women of good families envied courtesans for their dresses and ornaments. Evil came into existence because of creation. Woman gave birth, so she was the origin of all sin. Woman was hungry for love, and therefore unreliable. And yet, despite her weaknesses, she could be immensely virtuous, faithful and self-sacrificing. She should be respected. She symbolised Shakti.

  And there were all those wives who were burnt alive with their dead husbands, and Sakyamuni had told Ananda that women were stupid, jealous and vicious. Therefore his favourite disciple, Ananda, had given up his beloved Sundari. And now Hari Anand had forsaken his Champak. Doesn’t stand to reason. What is wrong with women that they should be shunned like lepers?

  In the morning he went across to the open-air class. The guru had already begun his lecture.

  “This is,” the Acharya was saying, “and this is not.”

  The students nodded.

  “The bound one, who is to be born again and again, has the path of his forefathers to traverse.”

  “Sakyamuni has questioned the very existence of a limited self. Perhaps it is the various conditions of consciousness, Sir,” Gautam put in and slipped out of the copse.

  The Ashram activities were in full swing. A sacrificial fire was burning in a mandap. Vedic gods and ancient sages were being honoured amid the
loud chanting of mantras. The deities that presided over intelligence and memory were being propitiated with burnt offerings.

  A group of medical students passed by. Gautam came out of the Hermitage. His heart was in great agony, his mind was in doubt and his soul was certainly not traversing the right path. The Upanishads said that for one who sought his self, his atman, his father was not his father, his mother was not his mother, the world was not the world, the thief was not the thief, the murderer was not the murderer. He had no concern with good or evil because he had conquered all the griefs of his heart . . . Gautam loitered all day on lonely pathways.

  A week passed. He did not have the courage to undertake the mission. Perhaps it was a fool’s errand. The monk had cleverly passed the buck to an idiot. Responsibility has no meaning, says he. Gautam began to have misgivings about everything. At night, he was bothered by mosquitoes. Toads and crickets disturbed his sleep. Noisy frogs used to be compared to Brahmins repeating their shlokas in unison. I am a mere frog, he decided, wallowing in self-pity. One morning he was awakened by an equally fretful Vimleshwar.

  “I came last evening to the camp to show my jewellery designs and some gems to the royal ladies. The guards won’t let me in.”

  Gautam took his friend out into the open to have a breakfast of fresh fruit and milk. In the copse of plantains the guru’s pet baby elephant plucked some bananas for them. From the ashram’s cowpen they got their milk. The two friends spent the morning strolling on the green, discussing politics.

  1 Jewel in the heart of the lotus.

  4. Aryani, Goddess of the Woods

  The royal barges were moored to the pier. Track-finders had brought the information that it was raining heavily in the foothills so the King had to wait. Camp was set up in the mahua grove, not far from Acharya Purshottam’s Hermitage. The jungle came to life. Courtiers moved about in the tract which till now had been the haunt of deer and wild boar, or an occasional student who passed by, lost in thought. The merchants of Shravasti arrived with their wares. Minstrels and gypsies were trying to attract an audience for their ballads and acrobatics.

  On a pleasant morning, Princess Nirmala set out with her bow and arrow to hunt deer. She was accompanied by Kumari Champak, the chief minister’s daughter. It was very still in the fields. Snatches of a haunting song came floating in the wind. Champak stopped under a kadamba tree and plucked its leaves one by one.

  “Lady of the Forest . . . ,” a student sang on his way to the Ashram—Gautam and Vimleshwar were passing by on a side track. The student sang the hymn to Aryani, the elusive Goddess of the Woods:

  Lady of the Forest

  Who seems to vanish from sight in the distance.

  Why don’t you ever come to our village?

  Surely you are not afraid of men?

  Gautam joined the singer.

  In the evenings you hear the Lady of the Forest

  Like a far-away voice crying,

  Or as the crash of a felled tree.

  She eats sweet berries

  And rests wherever she will,

  Perfumed with balm and fragrant,

  The mother of all things of the wild . . .

  The singer’s voice receded in the distance. Gautam halted near a spreading mango tree. “Don’t stand under a tree at high noon or dusk,” his mother used to say, “some playful tree-fairy might kidnap you.”

  “Who is it?” he exclaimed. The two friends quickly hid themselves in the lush foliage. “Who is it, standing under the kadamba tree—a god, a fairy or a yakshi?”

  Kumari Champak stood right in front holding a bough of the kadamba in her hand, languidly surveying the autumn landscape. With her elaborate hairdo, bright green bodice-and-sarong, seven-stringed gold necklace and golden waistband she seemed quite unreal. “Sudharshan Yakshini!” Gautam muttered in wonderment. “Tree-fairy, good to look at! Forest goddess!!”

  All of a sudden the ‘goddess’ screamed and let go of the leafy branch. A number of red ants had crawled up her bare legs. She shook them off. Her royal companion, the doe-eyed Nirmala, came running. From his vantage point, Gautam observed her as well. Why does she always paint her eyebrows blue? Women do amazing things to their faces. Around her waist she had tied a length of silk part of which she had thrown over her left shoulder. This was called the sari.

  “No deer, Champak dear. Let’s go,” she said a bit imperiously. They ambled away jingling their anklets. They were escorted by armed soldiers who followed them at a distance.

  “She was the Rajkumari, the other one is a mere lady-in-waiting. Let’s go before we are arrested. Look at all those security men! Why should they wear so much gold when they come on a hunting trip?” Vimleshwar grumbled.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll put in a word for you—I’m going right now to the camp,” Gautam told his friend airily. “Nobody can stop me, by virtue of my caste and status.”

  He started running towards the camp. His feet were bruised as he tore along on the scrub, taking a short-cut. He was already at the entrance of the encampment when the girls arrived.

  “A little rice, my good ladies,” he intoned, with feigned gravity. The sari-clad princess went straight into a tent, throwing down her bow and arrow. The magnolia girl stayed back and sat down on the edge of a red stone tank facing the royal tents. She regarded the student with interest. He was panting. Great runners, these, as well as expert swimmers, she thought admiringly. This was the fellow she had seen diving in the Saryu some months back. His shoulder-length, wavy hair and his white cotton mantle were streaming in the strong river wind as he stood there against the bright sky. He looked like the young god of the woods.

  “Rice and some lentils, too,” he repeated cheekily. Surrounded by flowers and squirrels, he now seemed to be a talking rabbit of the Panchatantra, begging for a carrot. The simile was not apt, but it was so funny that Champak burst out laughing. For some unknown reason she was suddenly feeling light and happy.

  He was jubilant. He laughed aloud, which was unbecoming for a scholar. So he checked himself and began: “And may the gods . . .”

  She interrupted him pleasantly. “Were you invoking the forest goddess a little while ago . . . pandit?”

  “Yes. I thought you were Aryani, till the ants upset you!” he answered frivolously, surprised by his own informality.

  “So you are Gautam Nilambar of the Forest University of Shravasti! I have heard about you.”

  “My dakshina, please. I’m getting late for my devotions,” he said hastily as a sentry passed by.

  A dark-skinned housemaid brought him the grains. She smiled at him in recognition. She was the parasol-woman he had seen at the ghat.

  He took the rice in his jholi, muttered the formal benediction and hastened out of the bamboo enclosure.

  How on earth was he to accomplish his task—a poor brahmachari caught in the act of giving a diamond ring to the pradhan mantri’s daughter—heavens would fall. I am already up to my ears in Woman Problems, he told himself gloomily, tramping back through the flame of the forest.

  The next morning he turned up again. He had gathered that the King was out hunting bison all day. The Rani was fat and lazy and mostly slept in her tent. The women of the retinue went about doing their chores. Champak and Nirmala spent the day sitting by the lotus tank, teaching their parrots and mynas to repeat various phrases. That was the pastime of all ladies of rank. Champak and Nirmala teased each other through their talking birds. “Get up, lazybones,” “Get lost, Nirmala,” “Pipe down, Champak.”

  Gautam found them tutoring their new pahari myna. “Say, Champak is a fool,” Nirmala told the bird. “Oh,” she saw Gautam and laughed shyly. The young brahmachari smiled. “May I have some rice and . . .”

  “You are just like our parrots. You repeat the same phrase day after day. Don’t you know any other words?” Champak asked him playfully.

  “We are not supposed to indulge in unnecessary conversation with laity, especially females.”

 
; “Are you training to be a purohit?” asked Nirmala.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Can you perform some rituals quickly to bring my brother, Prince Hari, back?”

  “Yes, I can. I’ll have to come here daily at a certain time, if you get me all the rare ingredients required for the havan.”

  “I will,” she said eagerly. He realised how easy it was to deceive women in these matters.

  “I’ll have to send for the stuff from the city,” Nirmala told him.

  “There is a thing called mohini which attracts people like nobody’s business. First you get that,” ordered Gautam with an air of authority about him.

  “Mohini! That’s used by tantrics—you are not a tantric, are you?” Champak asked dubiously.

  “No, no, I am not.” He sobered up. I’m getting into trouble, must make myself scarce. “Time for my classes, my good ladies,” he said looking at the trees’ shadows. “See you tomorrow.”

  At regular intervals he comes out of the wild flowers like an elf and vanishes again, Champak said to herself, wondering if she was finding some mohini in this attractive boy.

  The next day he had to wait by the lotus tank for the ingredients of mystic potency which were being brought from a magician in Shravasti. He spent the day talking to Champak. They laughed and chatted. She sang his favourite ragas. Nirmala remained doleful, probably because she had this overriding worry about her missing brother.

  In the evening the footmen came back from Shravasti, empty-handed. They could not find the requisite ingredients.

  “Could you perhaps try some jyotish, Vaidya?” Nirmala asked him anxiously. He drew a few lines on the ground and said, “The Prince has come back from Taxila and is somewhere here in the vicinity. I’ll do more calculations tomorrow.” Champak had promised to sing Sri Raga tomorrow. No wonder Hari Shankar had confused her with music!